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A thirtysomething woman with the easy smile of your favorite neighbor sits in her earth-tone living room, natural light washing over a gray couch so long it could easily fit four children. The woman speaks of a friend, a married mother, who was frustrated that she had to constantly remind her germophile husband to wash his hands. Hearing this, the woman cautioned her friend: “I think it would be better for your entire family to get the black plague and die … than for you to continue treating your husband like a toddler by reminding him to wash his hands.”

Welcome to Wife School, a video masterclass led by Tilly Dillehay, a 38-year-old Baptist writer, podcaster and pastor’s wife who teaches women how to “become the kind of woman who inspires a godly leader”. That means molding them into the wives she says that husbands want: smiling, attentive and submissive, women who know not to nag – even if it means risking the bubonic plague.

Wife School is part of a cottage industry of affable Christian women selling online courses to their compatriots promising connubial joy, with a generous helping of Bible passages and anecdotes from their own enviable relationships. The proof of concept is their domestic bliss, they say: Dillehay has a satisfied husband, picture-perfect family and a living room that looks straight out of Pottery Barn catalogue.

Though still small in reach, with interest cultivated via social media posts, word-of-mouth and podcast appearances, these courses hint at a crisis in Christian wifedom.

Women, especially those aged 18 to 29 (prime marrying age), are fleeing organized religion due in large part to its often regressive view on gender roles, experts say. Meanwhile, their male counterparts – brothers, friends, husbands – seem to be in the midst of a religious reawakening.

“You’ve got a lot of young women questioning the church,” said Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who studies influencers and the wellness industry. “Everywhere outside of the home feels unknown.”

That sort of spiritual turmoil, or any strife between partners, can be addressed by cultivating strength within the home, according to the creators of these courses.

“The way these women are selling these courses is [by saying], ‘I promise this is what you need. God would never steer you wrong.’ They’re selling wife skills, sure, but what they’re really selling is stability,” Wellman said.

The courses are aligned with an outspoken conservative movement that claims feminism is responsible for women’s discontent.

This month, Fox News host Lara Trump touted a poll that found 47% of gen Z women were interested in being trad wives, those much-discussed influencers who churn their own butter in a rotating assortment of milkmaid dresses, and have come to represent retrograde ideals of femininity. “It’s about a focus on returning to family … and a return to God,” Trump said, pointing to the failures of the “girlboss” era, a capitalistic career movement that left a generation of women burnt out and disillusioned. (The poll Trump cited was conducted by EduBirdie, a service that writes college papers for a fee; it defined tradwifedom as “a loving marriage, a stable job, a home full of kids” – so, not a tradwife at all.)

Dillehay does not call herself a tradwife. She does not style herself in the glam trappings of the Christian nationalist cool girl Allie Beth Stuckey, who believes that “it’s time to totally reject modern feminism”. She has a fraction of the Instagram followers of Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk who is currently on a barnstorming national tour and has called for “the revival of Biblical womanhood” – that would be Tillehay’s 11,000 to Kirk’s 6.6 million.

But she echos their talking points while projecting the unwavering domesticity of June Cleaver. And in February she garnered a powerful endorsement from Jessa Seewald, a member of the beleaguered Duggar family of 19 Kids and Counting fame, who called Wife School “encouraging, practical, and rooted in truth”.

In reality, Wife School and similar courses are indoctrination disguised as spiritually rigorous self-help content. “These women are building businesses that exploit these feelings of inadequacy that their followers have,” Wellman said. “They can say whatever they want, because they have been extremely successful in their curated presentation of self.”

Much of what they say is that every problem in a modern Christian marriage is the woman’s fault.

‘Proactive submission’

Wife School breaks down into a $17 six-week course with much of the content covering the ideal family structure and the necessity of submitting to your husband.

Dillehay uses the metaphor of a tandem bike to prescribe gender politics in marriage. The husband is at the front, managing the ride while his wife pedals helpfully behind him. “You’re exerting effort without being in control,” she said. When couples disagree, Dillehay said, wives should practice “the skill of ‘zip it’”.

She asks: do you want your husband to be the best version of himself? A man “shuts down … when he feels like he can’t please”.

Even as they cozy into their diminished role, wives must subtly guide their husbands into their God-given “leadership role”. Dillehay quotes Ephesians – “for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church” – and calls a wife’s deference to him “proactive submission”. Part of Wife School’s “homework” involves a worksheet instructing wives to ask for their husbands’ permission on nearly every decision: “Is it all right if I go out with the ladies on Saturday?” “Is it OK with you if I budget $300 for a new chair?” “Can I have your blessing to sign up for the women’s retreat committee?”

When Christian wives are taught that there is power in accepting an inferior position at home, “that feels very comforting, because there’s this sense of autonomy in that choice”, Wellman said.

Before she got married, Dillehay taught high school, sold insurance and was the managing editor of a small-town newspaper. She trained with the Association of Biblical Counselors, a certificate program that is not accredited by state licensing programs, and did not complete that course. “Honestly, I think the people you should get marriage advice from are people who are happily married themselves,” she wrote in an email to the Guardian. Dillehay says 700 women are enrolled in her class.

Ashley Lima, a self-described “feminine coach”, teaches a similar course intended to show “women how to become the Queen that inspires her man to lead, protect & provide so she can feel safe & loved again”, she claims on her social media. Lima, who has 300,000 followers across accounts, charges $167 for her “Feminine Reset Course” (66% off what she says is its full $497 value). Lima speaks to wives whose husbands have “drifted away from the alpha role … maybe you’re the alpha now”. By her logic, that’s bound to happen when women are not connected to their “God-given femininity”.

In a video filmed for her free trial, Lima sits in a minimalist-chic living room, with a fresh blowout and white cape blazer that would not look out of place on Ivanka Trump. She uses a mini-scale to dole out pink pills on one side and blue ones on the other, representing “feminine” and “masculine” energy. If those energies get muddled – a wife takes too much initiative, perhaps, pushing her husband “into his feminine energy” – then “the woman who wanted a grown man beside her now has a little boy”. (Lima did not respond to an interview request.)

Husbands’ actions are not interrogated in these courses. Referencing her past job as a newspaper editor, Dillehay advises wives to “rewrite the headlines”. For example: “The fact that my husband doesn’t do [BLANK] means he has time/space to [BLANK],” or “I don’t like the fact that he [BLANK] but it used to be attractive to me. Maybe someday I’ll like it again.” Women are told to thank their husbands three times a day. For “extra credit”, they can share one of their “rewritten headlines” – even if, deep down, the issue still bothers them.

In March, Rachael D Robnett, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, published the first study on men’s opinions of the tradwife movement. (Her research borrowed its definition from the British Australian influencer Alena Kate Pettitt’s description: “Submitting to my husband like it’s 1959”.) Robnett expected to see men with positive feelings toward the movement espouse “benevolent sexism”: sexism with a positive veneer, such as an interest in chivalry or believing that women need protection from men. Instead, she found these men were “overt, explicit and hostile” in their sexism. They believed stay-at-home wives had easier lives and felt that husbands in “breadwinning roles” were exploited.

Still, they relied on women for “the physical and emotional intimacy”, Robnett said, simultaneously resenting them while expecting them to bend to every whim. “Clearly, the element of submission that’s present for tradwives is a really major draw for men who have negative attitudes toward women,” she said.

Christian wifedom courses do not question this dynamic. They might be for women, but their beneficiaries are undoubtedly the husbands.

Husband-first sex

Dillehay advocates for wives to track their cycles, from PMS to ovulation and “hormonal slumps” – but not for family planning purposes. Dillehay would rather wives track the “insanity” of their emotions so they can be kinder to their husbands.

It wasn’t until recently that Dillehay, who has four children aged two to 11, learned about hormonal cycles at all. Her ignorance is perhaps understandable; evangelical Christian women are subject to a suffocating purity culture that shames adherents for pre- or extramarital sexual exploration. Former evangelical women report receiving little to no guidance on how their bodies work, only scare tactics designed to keep them from having sex outside the bonds of matrimony.

But purity culture has given way to something (slightly) sexier in some corners of the Christian right. Donald Trump supporters anointed actor Sydney Sweeney as one of them, raving about her bombshell looks and measurements. Maha wellness guru Alex Clark calls her following of stylish young Republicans “cuteservatives”. And soon Evie Magazine, a Cosmo for conservative women, will release its splashy “Sex Issue”, whose cover features a model wearing Like a Virgin-era Madonna bridal lingerie. Evie’s website is a peek inside an idealized wife’s sex life, serving up “The Wife’s Guide to a Morning Quickie He’ll Think About All Day” (husbands, good) and “My Vibrator Almost Destroyed My Marriage” (solo sex, bad).

Lima, the “femininity coach”, generalizes that women are just not as interested in sex as men. Nevertheless, sex was created by God, according to Lima, “to glue you two together”, and “when you start making it about you and when you ‘feel like it’, you are opening the door to division, temptation and starvation”.

That kind of talk makes Dillehay’s instruction to wives to “take [their] own pleasure seriously” – if only because it will increase their husband’s pleasure – sound downright revolutionary. Her ever-so-slight concession may be a welcome change to a culture that long shunned public discussions of intimacy.

“On one hand, discussion of sex, even within the confines of marriage, is probably not bad for this audience,” said Elena Trueba, a writer who covers Christian fundamentalist culture. “These women who came out of purity culture went into marriage incredibly unprepared for the experience.”

But it’s a restrictive standard of sexy. “A patriarchal lens is not going to be women-centered,” said Tia Levings, an ex-fundamentalist who writes about extremist Christian culture. “It’s not going to be based on sound science, it’s going to be based on ideology with a heavy bias inserted. It’s dangerous, because that’s how misinformation gets spread.”

Nod to women’s pleasure aside, Wife School’s sex advice favors religious ideology over practicality or safety.

“A husband expects a yes,” when he asks for sex, Dillehay says, even when his wife might rather not. She quotes Corinthians: “Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time.”

In a seemingly unintentional reference to the gen X college romcom Threesome, in which Stephen Baldwin’s character says something similar, Dillehay also compares sex to pizza: when it’s good, it’s great – and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Unfortunately that means that sometimes wives will have to settle for “frozen pizza” – an extended metaphor that sounds not entirely consensual.

The CDC reports that one in four women will experience physical violence by their intimate partners at some point during their lifetime. Abuse in general is underreported, especially in patriarchal communities. Trueba had this on her mind when she attended Wife School for her Substack and discovered it wasn’t until week six that Dillehay disclaimed her course is not meant to address tough issues such as “what to do if your husband is using porn” or “what to do if you think you are being abused”.

Dillehay instead directs wives to a series of blogs written by Christian counselor and writer Jim Newheiser, who acknowledges that “physical and sexual abuse … affect the Christian community in particular” but believes “the zeal to correct the failures of the past have swung too far the other way”. He argues against always believing victims and writes that sometimes abuse stems from a victim’s “sinfulness”.

“[Wives] are told that abuse is their problem, something they need to fix,” Trueba said. “To me, that’s really the enduring takeaway of Wife School.”

As for the frozen pizza metaphor, Dillehay said in an email: “If a woman’s husband is forcing her to engage in sexual activity with him, she should get help. That’s wrong … The frozen pizza metaphor means that sometimes sex is just sex and that’s OK.”

Teachings based in evangelical Christianity

Dillehay may not be well known, but she is connected to a man who has made part of his life’s work advancing a strand of evangelical Christianity that reduces its women to adornments.

Outside of Wife School, Dillehay has released three Christian self-help books. The latest, an allegorical novel inspired by CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters about a “diabolical” woman and her “junior devil” who conspire to sabotage “a young woman’s relationship with her creator”, was published by Canon Press, an imprint owned by Idaho-based extremist pastor Douglas Wilson.

Wilson is opposed to a woman’s right to vote, proudly describes himself as a “Christian nationalist” and has espoused pro-Confederacy views. For the past 50 years, he has held a stronghold in Moscow, Idaho, where he and his flock aim to establish a “theocracy” based on his moral authority.

Levings, the ex-fundamentalist, escaped Wilson’s congregation, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, in 2007. She now runs a Substack covering religious trauma, tradwife culture and Christian nationalism, and she wrote a memoir of her abusive marriage to a man who was inspired by Wilson’s patriarchal teachings. Levings took Dillehay’s course, which she described as “old ideas with new faces”.

The new face, she said, is Dillehay: a home schooling mother who does not project the same stardom aspirations as Kirk, Stuckey or Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm infamy. “Those are women who have jobs,” Levings said. “They preach the same doctrines, but they don’t actually embody it. Dillehay stands out. She’s not flashy, she doesn’t wear a lot of jewellery, her social media is very manageable for one person who’s staying at home. It has that authenticity to it.”

Marketing Christian marriage as something to be studied gives Wife School a kind of “theological depth” that’s lacking from a lot of performative tradwife influencer content, Levings said. “Her audience thinks they’re being studious,” she said. “It doesn’t manifest a different outcome, but it will appeal to their intelligence, so they think they’re making a critical decision. It’s not surface-minded.”

Christian nationalists such as Wilson want to turn the US into a rigid patriarchal theocracy, with concerned wives and mothers playing a significant role in supporting the movement. One recent survey found a third of Americans support or sympathize with Christian nationalist ideals – and women are just as likely to hold these views as men. Wife School does not explicitly discuss politics, but its students are primed for compliance.

In her final goodbye to students, Dillehay says she hopes that her instruction has resonated – and if not, that’s OK, too. But after settling into her obedient place at home, Dillehay said she’s noticed “a sweetness” felt by both her husband and her children, happiness coming at the price of shutting up and following orders. As Dillehay puts it: “If you’re going to suffer, suffer as a righteous woman.”